Light-induced degradation and metastable-state recovery with reaction kinetics modeling in boron-doped Czochralski silicon solar cells

Solar cells fabricated from boron-doped p-type Czochralski silicon suffer from light-induced degradation that can lower the conversion efficiency by up to 10% relative. When solar cells are exposed to temperatures between 100°C and 200°C under illumination, regeneration, in which the minority carrier lifetime is gradually recovered, occurs after the initial light-induced degradation. We studied the light-induced degradation and regeneration process using carrier injection within a design chamber and observed open-circuit voltage trends at various sample temperatures. We proposed a cyclic reaction kinetics model to more precisely analyze the degradation and recovery phenomenon. Our model incorporated the reaction paths that were not counted in the original model between the three states (annealed, degradation, and regeneration). We calculated a rate constant for each reaction path based on the proposed model, extracted an activation energy for each reaction using these rate constants at various temperatures, and calculated activation energies of redegradation and the stabilization reaction.